American Woman (33 page)

“Somewhere to get rid of this car.” The trees had thinned out to one side, and she saw the outline of the house, standing bravely and absurdly in its clearing like a child's play-castle, its conical tower distinct against the dimly lit sky. All its windows were dark. She continued on, down the slight dip past the pit where the ice house had been, toward the huge listing stables. The car would be there, if the car still existed. The keys would be tossed on the seat. She had embarked on this plan telling herself that if the car were there she would swap the Bug for it and go. Dolly maintained a state of cold war with the various branches of local government as her ancestors had, since the time the region's other humans had ceased to be tenants on family land. She failed to pay taxes and was condescending to the police. She hadn't driven in years. She wasn't likely to notice the disappearance of one car and its replacement by another for a while, and even then she wasn't likely to report it. And yet, despite these rationales, Jenny had already known as she crossed the bridge over the river, the Bug all alone on the road, her hands sweating so much she was wiping them off constantly, that she wouldn't be able to take Dolly's car and just go. She'd pretended she could, but she couldn't.

“Where are we?” Pauline repeated.

The wooden planks of the door to the stables moaned with age but the metal hardware glided in its tracks; that was her handiwork, accomplished as much as a year ago. She was glad for it now. Like most old people Dolly slept shallowly. The sound of a car on her road might have roused her already, but now that the engine was silent all other noise made Jenny cringe. The moonlight sifted into the vast space and she saw Dolly's car. Inside it still smelled of the cool plastic showrooms of 1961. The odometer still stood at less than halfway to ten thousand. The ashtrays were all still pristine, though there might have been invisible motes in the rugs from Jenny's own cigarettes, blown back by the wind as she'd smoked out the window. The keys were on the seat and picking them up she remembered the opposite gesture of casting them down, the night she had left here with Frazer, and then she felt sure the keys hadn't been touched in the three months since then. Turning the keys the lights came on dimly, but the car only coughed. They would have to jump-start it. “Help me push the Bug in here,” she said. Pauline still sat as if glued to the passenger seat, staring at their new surroundings with something like suspicion, or dire realization; she belatedly stared at Jenny. “Goddammit, come on,” Jenny said.

“He might not be dead,” Pauline suddenly said, as if this were a plausible option they hadn't considered. “And even if he is, he's still just—an establishment pig.”

Jenny felt her scalp glowing with heat.

“Help me push this car,” she said, releasing each word with great care, as if each involved lifting a valve on a pressurized tank that might spew its contents everywhere.

They pushed the Bug onto the smooth packed-dirt floor of the stables. Brusquely removing Pauline from her path, Jenny felt her way to a work table against the back wall. There was an oily rag here, and a flashlight. Outside was the standpipe. Once there she took great gulps of air as if drinking; she knew Pauline was just inside the door, watching her from that darkness. The water from the standpipe ran clear and she wondered if Dolly had somebody new working for her. The possibility had never crossed her mind until now. She held the rag under the water, letting it soak full and wringing it out, until she realized the water had made her hands numb and the rag had been wet a long time. Her gaze seemed to have drifted away like a ghost, but it was mute and sent nothing back to her. She didn't see, again and for a last time, the steep drop of the hill toward the river, which was trench-deep and black like a fjord. She didn't see the particular things of this place, which meant nothing to her; this was just a way station she'd known for a while. She wrung out the rag lightly the last time, so that it stayed sodden. Then she went back in the stable and thrust the wet rag and flashlight at Pauline. “Put our things in this car. Then get in the Bug and clean off every trace of the blood of your so-called establishment pig. Use the flashlight. If I'm not back when you're done wait here for me. Don't move from this spot.”

“Where are you going?” Pauline grabbed at her jacket.

Jenny shrugged her off. “Up to the house.”

“What if somebody finds me?”

“They won't, if you stay in this spot.”

The house was still dark when she left the trees and crossed into the clearing. Her shadow followed her along the twilit grass, only visible in movement; when she stood still, it melted away. Across the lawn she could see the black form of the pergola, like a miniature twin of the house. Stepping onto the dark porch she reached easily for the doorknob, not needing to feel her way to it. She opened the door and heard Dolly say, “You get out, mister. I've called the police.”

“It's me, Miss Dolly.”

“What?” Dolly cried.

“It's Iris.”

Once Dolly had managed to turn on a lamp they regarded each other a long time without speaking, whether in astonishment, or resignation, or suspicion she couldn't quite tell. Dolly seemed smaller, as if her aging had accelerated, and constricted her bones. But her gaze was still keen. Jenny saw myriad things flicker through it: apprehension undone by impatience; dark speculation; instinctive imperiousness. “Well, Iris,” she finally said. “You must be back to rob me. I thought that you had when you ran off before, but I see you decided to wait.”

“I'm sorry to come here so late.”

“Oh, please. It's a bit farcical to apologize, isn't it? I suppose your young man is outside in the bushes. That day that he came looking for you I was sure you must be in cahoots. I've been through this house with a comb to see what might be missing.”

“If I had meant to rob you I would have done it then, as you said. Your logic is perfectly right. So you have to admit, logically, that I never intended to rob you at all.”

“Don't appeal to logic, Iris. There's nothing logical about your behavior. I was very disappointed at the way you left me.”

“I'm sure you've found someone better by now.”

“I have not. I have not had the time to do interviews. I've had very bad health this whole summer.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Very sorry, I'm sure. You left all my most important projects in the lurch, Iris. If you'd had the sense to speak with me before you went we might have arranged for your wages, but I'm afraid as it is you must forfeit. I don't want to imagine what fresh difficulty has brought you back here.”

“I'm not here for the wages.” She hesitated, then rushed on. “I'd like your car. I can offer you three hundred dollars.”

“It's a quarter past four in the morning. You can't expect me to believe that you've come here to purchase my car.” Jenny kept silent and Dolly added, “My car is worth much more than that,” but Jenny sensed that she'd spoken to gain time to think. “You're here in a car,” Dolly pointed out.

“I'd leave that car in the stable. It would work all right as a runabout if you hire someone new, but it's no good for distance, and that's what I need now. I need to get home to my family. It's a sort of emergency.”

“That's what your note said yon three months ago. ‘Emergency. Must travel home to see family.' You don't seem to have got very far.”

“I ran into delays.”

“As I said, I'd prefer not to know what fresh difficulty brings you back here.” Dolly lowered herself into her favorite armchair and pulled her robe around her shoulders. When she trained her skeptical gaze onto Jenny again it was scaled back to the usual version, as if they were bickering over their tea. “I suppose you thought of my car because you assume I'd take anything for it. Three hundred dollars! I bought that car new.”

“Thirteen years ago, and you never drive it. You once told me you hadn't driven that car in a decade.”

“It would still be a great handicap not to have it. Five hundred's the least I could think of, and that's robbery.”

“You owe me eight months of back wages.”

“I've made clear what I think of your wages. A few weeks' notice of departure is the norm, Iris, let alone a ‘good-bye' to my face.”

Dolly drew herself up and Jenny thought, with sudden pain, of the little tin cash box into which Mrs. Fowler had carefully counted the limp dollar bills from the house tours. Dolly must never have known how she'd pay Jenny's wages. She must have trembled with relief, perhaps very slight shame, when she found Jenny gone.

“Three hundred fifty,” Jenny said. “I can't do any better. If that's not enough I guess I'll wait until morning and look in the classified ads.” She sat back in her own chair, heart pounding. She felt sure Dolly saw through her bluff, but she saw through Dolly as well. She saw the three hundred fifty dollars taking hold in Dolly's mind as a sum she already possessed.

“I'll consider it a favor to you,” Dolly finally said. “I was sorry you left.”

“I was, too.” And in some sense, she meant it.

It would have taken just a little while longer to finish. An alteration in the bluish gray night told her dawn was coming. They would drive to the state park and wait until night fell again, sheltered in the new car. Dolly was counting out each bill with awful care onto the kitchen table and Jenny wanted to shake her. But in a minute they'd be free, in this one small respect. This was how it was now, an obstacle cleared, then another, a course without end . . . “Who's there?” Dolly barked. The front door had creaked open. Jenny looked up in shock. Pauline stood trembling in the center of the parlor, just beyond the kitchen door.

“I thought you were selling me out,” Pauline miserably whispered.

T
HE SUN
had risen by the time they were moving again. It lit up the mist lying over the river; but the air was still cold, and the mist glowed like silvery fleece without burning away. It beamed bright yellow light through the trees and poured into the passenger window as they raced north between yellowing fields and along broken stone walls toward the bridge. Against it Pauline was a blurred silhouette. The scene at Dolly's seemed to press like a brick on the gas, so that the need for prudence at the moment was shoved aside by the thought of prudence's recent failure. Dolly had stared at Pauline in a stunned, transfixed way—Dolly, whose only companion in the long hours between teatime visits was the television in her bedroom. Dolly who pretended repulsed noninterest in the world at large, but was as alert as anyone to the vagaries and deviations of celebrity persons, whether they'd grown prominent for quality or crime. Dolly who watched Walter Cronkite each night as if keeping a private appointment. Dolly had accepted Jenny's stammering false introduction without asking why an old friend named Ann from New Jersey had never been mentioned before. She hadn't seemed to hear the unfamiliar phrase “selling me out.” She had squared the money into a pile without completing her count, and folded it protectively into one hand. “You must be wanting to be on your way,” she had murmured, and Jenny thought she saw a flush in her face—of excitement? Anxiety? Pauline had fled out to the porch, and Jenny stood waiting a final time for Dolly to make her laborious, stubbornly unaided way from the kitchen back into the parlor. “If you foul up your travels again,” Dolly said between breaths, “please don't come here at an ungodly hour. Have the sense to come during the day.” Jenny had thought that Dolly must be playing dumb out of fear they would kill her. Outside she had grabbed Pauline's arm and pulled her, stumble-running through the trees; Pauline had tried to talk and Jenny snapped, “Don't talk!” The jumper cables slipped out of her hands and the car's hood bit down on her finger before the car came to life and they were bumping down the drive and back over the chain that still lay in zigzags in the dust.

They turned west to cross the river at Kingston and the dark humped-up mountains faced them. They'd once made her think of those great shiplike forms of the West, the mountains that rise from the desert and grow no more near for the hours spent driving toward them. Those mountains gave off an illusion of nearness, but these did the opposite thing; up to their threshold they looked vast and wild, and then were revealed as bright sunny hills. The East had once promised refuge to her, because she'd never been to it. Now she felt smothered by intimacy. A miniature town sat at the gate of the miniature mountains, quaint and forgotten, shuttered churches and a rusted gas station, a dairy store with its pay telephone. The same kind of sad shrinking pond she had swum in for over two years. She pulled into the store parking lot. It wasn't yet open at six in the morning and it might not have opened in years. She had to turn off the engine to unlock the trunk, but then she realized that Pauline had nothing but the clothes she was wearing. No bag, not even a coat. “I don't suppose that you can understand,” Jenny said quickly, before the shake in her voice broke her words, “because to you it's a
pig
that has died, but you and I are now guilty of murder. And so if I was ever stupid enough to think that staying with you and Juan and Yvonne was good for me, I know better now.”

“You
are
selling me out!”

“No, I'm saying good-bye! You might have gotten into all this so that you could kill
pigs
but that's not what I'm in it for, that's never what I was in it for. I was bad enough off when I met you and now it's just worse!” She dug in her pockets, where the rest of their money was stored in disorderly wads, and thrust more than half at Pauline. “Get out of the car.”

“No!”

“Get out of the car! This car is all I have left from two years of hard work and I don't owe you for it. I don't owe you at all. There's a pay phone right there—call your parents. You can call them collect.”